Joan’s Careful Cork Rituals Meet an Unsettling Lodger
One woman’s routines become a subtle study of control, solitude and disturbance. Danielle McLaughlin changes Joan’s Cork life quietly through a lodger’s arrival, giving character-led fiction readers precision, unease and observation without overstating the drama around her. The restraint makes the unease sharper.
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Rituals
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Joan’s Careful Cork Rituals Meet an Unsettling Lodger
One woman’s routines become a subtle study of control, solitude and disturbance. Danielle McLaughlin changes Joan’s Cork life quietly through a lodger’s arrival, giving character-led fiction readers precision, unease and observation without overstating the drama around her. The restraint makes the unease sharper.
- Book Synopsis
-
Joan, a public servant in her fifties, is in the habit of living alone. Or rather, she’s in the habit of living with the many rituals and routines—some ordinary, some less so—that allow her to navigate her days.
It’s a system that works very well for Joan… until it doesn’t. An unexpected career break prompts her to take in a lodger, a young man studying English Literature at the university. Together they must learn to negotiate everything from a shared bathroom to the hazards of global warming.
Set in Cork city, Rituals takes us inside an obsessive mind and invites us to reflect upon the power and beauty contained within our daily lives, but also the dark grip of compulsion. By turns tender, funny and poignant, it celebrates the bravery involved in opening our hearts to change and to chance.
Ideal for readers who:
- Enjoy character-led Irish contemporary fiction exploring the comforts of routine, solitude and the inner mind.
- Watch as a woman's carefully structured lifestyle is disrupted by an unexpected career break and a new lodger.
- Love settling into atmospheric Cork city stories focused on shared domestic spaces, psychological compulsion and quiet change.
- Prefer tender, subtly funny novels where a sense of unease develops organically from small daily habits.
- Product Details
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- ISBN
- 9781916914049
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Stinging Fly Press, (23 April 2026)
- Number of Pages
- 162
- Language
- English
- Categories: